Americans and Germans view climate change differently, according to a study by University of Vienna student Dorothea Born, who visited NC State Wednesday to discuss how cultural differences can be seen in images of popular science magazines.
The lecture, titled “Imag(in)ing Nature In Climate Change,” was a collection of Born’s qualitative findings about how climate change is communicated in pictures included in popular science magazines, particularly in the American publication National Geographic and Germany’s GEO Magazine.
Her study, “Imag(in)ing Polar Bears – The Creation of an Icon for Climate Change Communication,”focused mainly on the different ways the issue of climate change is addressed in each publication and how pictures are used to convey these points. Born explained that popular science magazines are the most common medium for disseminating scientific information to the general public.
“Modern models assume very different opinions between the scientific community and the general public,” Born said. “But more knowledge about science does not necessarily lead to more acceptance.”
Throughout the course of the lecture, Born displayed images taken from National Geographic and GEO magazines meant to interest the reader in climate change. “Defining nature in a specific way creates imaginations of how nature and culture should relate,” Born said.
The relationship of culture to nature is a cornerstone of Born’s study, who used the differences in imagery in the German and American magazines to explain general cultural trends. For example, climate change was a front page issue on GEO as early as 1989, while it took National Geographic until 1998 to do the same. This difference, Born explained, is evidence of a difference of opinion among the countries.
Born used examples of seal photography from each magazine to show how National Geographic, and presumably American culture, seems to believe that culture and people should interfere with nature when it is necessary, while GEO and ostensibly German culture believe the two should be keep to themselves.
To Tyler Rohrbach, a junior studying environmental science and marine science, the presentation was interesting but not without its flaws.
“She made the case that National Geographic shows less controversial images, and I don’t necessarily agree with that,” Rohrbach said.
Born also discussed what she considers the iconization of polar bears as symbols for the fight against climate change. Citing images from National Geographic publications as far back as 1995, Born showed the progression of polar bears as the subject of a picture into a new visual language where the use of polar bears is seen as a testament to climate change. Born said that America’s individualistic culture, which oftentimes values the individual over the community, tends to sympathize more with a singular struggling polar bear than a graph showing the decline of sea ice in polar bear territory.
Born went on to explain how polar bears have been used by groups in the United States as an indirect way to lobby for climate action, while in Germany, political parties have been upfront in their use of climate imagery to sway public opinion.
The study, which Born is currently working on as a visiting scholar at Virginia Tech, has received some criticism. After the presentation, Born fielded questions regarding the one-sided presentation of this imagery as perhaps misleading the public to think climate change was a bigger deal than it actually was.
Rohrbach refuted this claim and said, “The climate change debate has been over for a long time. The science is on the side of the climate change experts, regardless of how the images are presented. It’s up to the magazines to convince the public.”
